Crypto Today:  Altcoins attempt a recovery ahead of the New Year

Here's what you need to know on Monday

Markets: 

• The BTC/USD is currently trading at $7,359 (unchanged on a day-to-day basis). The coin has been locked in a tight range during early Asian hours on Monday.
• The ETH/USD pair is currently trading at $134.83 (+4.5% on a day-to-day basis). The Ethereum retreated from the intraday high of $135.42 amid technical recovery.
• XRP/USD recovered to the area above $0.19. At the time of writing, the coin is trading at $0.1953 with 1.2% gains on a day-to-day basis.
• Among the 100 most important cryptocurrencies, the best of the day are BitTorrent (BTT) $0.0003 (+13.85%), Horizen (ZEN) $7.42 (+11.5%) and Bytecoin (BCN) $0.0002 (+7.49%). The day's losers are EDUCare(SLV) $0.0545 (-14.5%), TomoChain (TOMO) $0.5169 (-9.3%), Waves (WAVES) $0.9883 (-6.25%).

Chart of the day:
ETH/USD, 1-hour chart

Market:

• The founder and the CEO of Galaxy Digital Michael Novogratz came up with another Bitcoin price forecast. He believes that the first cryptocurrency will cost over $12,000 by the end of 2020. He wrote his predictions on Twitter. Notably, this is not his first Bitcoin forecast. In summer, he expected that the biggest digital coin could exceed $20,000. Also, he said that the price would never fall below $8,500. Both his forecasts proved to be wrong.
• Ripple's chief technology officer David Schwartz denied the allegations that the company uses XRP as a stream of revenue. He tried to dispel the conviction that Ripple controlled the token and manipulated its price to benefit from it. Notably, the company sold huge tranches of XRP during the past two years.

Industry: 

• Google banned Ethereum's official cryptocurrency wallet MetaMask from Google Play on the ground of policy violations. The hi-tech giant rejected the appeal submitted by the MetaMask team, though it is not entirely clear why Google applied strict measures to the decentralized application (DApp). Google's policy prohibits any application from providing mining tools. However, MetaMask has never provided mining facilities to its users.
• Cryptocurrency project HEX might have performed an exit scam. The community members noticed that the owners of the ICO wallet had started transferring ETH coins to cryptocurrency exchanges. About 800 Ether tokens were withdrawn from the wallet. Notably, the head of the project Richard Heart declined to reveal the name of the person who holds the keys to the ICO wallet. 

Regulation:

• The central bank of South Korea is actively exploring the concept of central bank digital currency (CBDC). The South Korean regulator has established the task force group for that purpose. The news was announced in the report "Monetary Policy 2020," published at the end of the previous week. The bank said that it had been studying distributed ledger technology, crypto assets, and CBDC. Also, the regulator intends playing an active role in overseeing the industry.
• The outgoing president of Switzerland Ueli Maurer believes that Facebook's Libra is a failed project that has no chances to succeed in its current form. The cryptocurrency is unlikely to be approved by the Swiss regulator, according to Maurer.

"I don't think (Libra has a chance in its current form), because central banks will not accept the basket of currencies underpinning it," he told Swiss broadcaster SRF.

Notably, the co-creator of the project, David Marcus, admitted that regulatory hurdles could cause the delay of Libra launch.

Quote of the day: 

 

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